1. It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi, Iran / France / Luxembourg / United States)
One of the most courageous works of cinema ever produced (for which the director has already received another prison sentence), Panahi shows us sides of Iranian life—from the trauma suffered by the nation's political prisoners to women not wearing hijabs—that have been explicitly or implicitly forbidden filmmakers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Though it is more straightforward in its storytelling than many of his recent films, this isn't to suggest that It Was Just an Accident lacks formal achievement. Indeed, Panahi masterfully deploys off-screen space and establishes a thematic emphasis on knowing through hearing, a very cinematic idea ultimately, which will find its fullest expression in the film's haunting final shot.
2. Dry Leaf (Aleksandre Koberidze, Georgia / Germany)
With What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? already rating as one of the biggest critical breakthroughs—and best films—of this current decade, Koberidze follows it up with an even more experimental and stylistically audacious portrait of his Caucasus homeland. Rendered through obsolete Ericsson Mobile technology, Koberidze's highly Kiarostamian Dry Leaf introduces a painterly world of barely legible low-resolution spaces, of disused football pitches and depopulated Soviet small towns, that are marked by the ghosts of the past—and literally invisible characters in the present. At a moment of deep distrust of the index, Dry Leaf refuses photo-reality altogether.
3. Magellan (Lav Diaz, Philippines / Spain / Portugal / France / Taiwan)
Charting Ferdinand Magellan's near complete path around the globe from an especially vivid and singular rendering of first contact between European explorers and the indigenous people of Malacca to his anticlimactic slaying in the Philippines after crossing the Pacific a decade later, Diaz's latest slow cinema opus extends his national historical project, claiming the eponymous heroes' death as an anti-colonial cultural inheritance. Despite a truncated 160-minute running time for the legendarily long-form Diaz, Magellan evokes expansive duration like only the Filipino master can, reimagining an experience of a life (fruitlessly) lived years away from home.
Israel's most critically lauded contemporary filmmaker returns with a wildly free, impressionistic, and characteristically scathing look at life in his literally embattled homeland, as seen through a pair of libertine lovers who (as the title partially suggests) always say yes. A pulsating, absurdist portrait of a deeply degenerate people, Yes shifts tones in its second part to consider the psychological impact of October 7th on the Israeli people—a nation whose lived experience, where the choice is between being killed and killing, is no less easy to comprehend than that of Palestinians—before returning to the actual propaganda that this national trauma has yielded.
5. What Does That Nature Say to You (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Making use of the autobiographically inspired myopic focus of 2023's in water, Hong's 33rd feature, in fewer than three decades, is, like its immediate predecessor By the Stream, a bigger film, suggesting an increased interest in creating discrete works of craft after a historically unparalleled decade of extremely subtle theme-and-variation artistry. The comparatively lyrical What Does That Nature Say to You tells its familiarly Hongian story across a single day, night, and morning, seeing its visiting new poet boyfriend through the shifting perspectives of the film's family of four, before he suddenly loses the good will of his paternal (and fellow artist) hosts.
Bringing the director's loose elemental trilogy (Undine, Afire) to its graceful conclusion, Mirrors No. 3 is perhaps most remarkable for the persistent winds that whirl through the film's northeastern German setting, and mess houseguest Paula Beer's hair; in this sense, Petzold brings cinema back to its first source of spectacle—to the movement of the natural world on film that was present from the Lumière brothers' first experiments with the moving image. Mirrors No. 3 ultimately exchanges Afire's literary subject for recorded and performed music as Petzold continues to make some of the most finely crafted and emotionally resonant films anywhere.
Though there is something somewhat conventional about aspects of Laxe's filmmaking (his shot lengths, camera positions, etc.), his Cannes breakthrough is in another sense the most singular and contemporary cinematic experience of 2025, a shockingly melodramatic and immediate art-house Mad Max that transverses the deserts and mountains of 21st century Morocco. This is truly a film of pure movement, exemplified in the pulsing EDM soundtrack that carries the film's makeshift community from rave to rave, as world war and a global migrant crisis transform Laxe's fictional world into one that doesn't seem so far removed from our own.
8. Kontinental '25 (Radu Jude, Romania / Switzerland / Luxembourg / Brazil / United Kingdom)
Like all films a document on some level of its (exceedingly inexpensive) production, the Godardian Jude uses his frontal cellular setups to take the temperature of Europe circa 2025, exploring the contradictions of modern Romania in particular through a series conversations meant to assuage the bailiff's liberal guilt following the suicide of a homeless man. Kontinental '25 is Lumière to Dracula's Méliès, a more conceptually modest, but ultimately far more successful tour through modern-day Transylvania whose references include Rossellini's Europa '51 and Wenders' Perfect Days, before ending in an unexpectedly artful city symphony.
9. Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa, Ukraine / France / Germany / Netherlands / Latvia / Romania / Lithuania)
Absolute in its moral clarity and among the year's most clear-sighted works, Loznitsa's latest portrait of Stalinist Russia efficiently follows a young prosecutor as he miraculously receives news of a Soviet hero's mistreatment in a provincial prison—and pursues justice to its inevitable conclusion, his own final-act reckoning for questioning the Soviet state's actions. A work of spare prison cells and bare stonewalls, crowded country trains and the comforts of first class, blacks and whites and brown wood paneling, Two Prosecutors balances its visual austerity with the labyrinthine interiors and endless queues constructed to break the Soviet people's will.
10. The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, United States / United Kingdom)
Continuing the director's streak of best work that began with the especially comic First Cow and extended into her art-school-themed Showing Up, the director's anti-heist film latest gets the Arthur Dove theft done quickly as attention soon shifts to passing time, first with the labor of stashing the stolen paintings in a barn loft and then hiding out in dank hotel rooms as news of the titular mastermind's identity splashes across newspapers. Impulse trumps deliberation, and reality expresses itself most of all in Reichardt's tragicomic genre effort, where most of the effort goes into recreating a particular time and texture and moment in American cultural life.
No comments:
Post a Comment